Organizational Behavior in Human Relations - Essay Example

Leadership is a process where people are motivated; in fact, “workers look up to their leaders and feel immensely satisfied if leaders take them into confidence and share their wisdom and experience” (“Organizational Behavior,” n.d., p. 161). However, it is very unfortunate that despite its importance, there is no best way to create leaders in advance, and there is no consensus on what are the attributes that could help in developing leaders. Leaders are playing a great role in the employee engagement and motivation; thus, this problem has been subject to extensive studies for the purpose of coming up a universal and consistent leadership approach that an individual should need to become an effective leader (Packard, 2009).

All organizational behavior/human relation subjects need the cooperation of people, and only leader “knows how to keep people focused” (Maccoby, 2000, p. 58). Culture is learned over many years; thus, transforming people’s actual behavior and values called for an intensive and tenacious reinforcement that can be performed by strategic leaders (Osborne & Brown, p. 82). Leaders can make employees more committed, but they can also create a climate of fear, distrust, discouragement, and de-motivation if the leadership style is not appropriate with the context.

In fact, there are instances that a change initiative failed because leaders did not thoroughly handled the situation by aligning management practices and organizational behavior. Thus, leadership is vital to the organization, and “without leadership, nothing will be accomplished” and “The organization will fall apart” (Homan, 2011, p. 211). 2.0 Solution to the Problem from the Organizational Behavior/Human Relations Based on early leadership theories, leaders are characterized by superior qualities or traits that are endowed to them since birth; thus, the experts concluded that “leaders are born and not made” (Adair, 2006, p. 9). However, when experts cannot present a detailed description of the trait to become an effective leader, a behavioral theory emerged.

This theory stated that leadership can be learned, trained, and developed. Later on, a contingency theory is developed because of insufficient evidences, and it is centered on situational context wherein an effective leader knew how to adapt and match his or her behaviors to a particular applied context. On the other hand, there is no universal way to become a good leader because the environment is rapidly changing, and organizations need to cope up with this change to be successful. Thus, the best solution is to work as a team and apply the contingency approach through the use of different leadership styles in different contingencies because there is no ‘one best way’ to manage all instances (Burnes, 2009).

For organizations to have an effective leadership, they need to identify the situation at hand, recognize the antecedents and consequences, develop an appropriate leadership style to discourage negative behaviors, and evaluate the appropriate leadership approaches. 3.0 Evaluate Solutions in Terms of Managerial & Employee Perceptions The contingency approach as a solution to the leadership behavior problem is an advantage on the part of the employee because “factors such as the type of task, the time available, and the skill of the members determine what type of leadership is most appropriate for a